Great thread and find OP you have educated me and shown me a new cam to add to the old bookmark list.
Watching meteors live is the best though..but albeit more bothersome.
near dawn the green ones are quite welll green.

When a meteor strikes Earth’s atmosphere it decelerates rapidly. The friction created by the air causes the meteor to burn up at extremely high
temperatures creating the white “shooting star” that we are all familiar with. This process also ionises the air along the trail making it
possible to reflect radio waves.

Utilising a high powered VHF radar signal sent into the sky, we are able to detect reflected waves from these ionisation trails. Because the meteor is
moving, the reflected signal is shifted in frequency from the original, by an amount according to it’s speed. This shift is also heard as an audible
ping by the station operator.

Our system translates the reflected wave into three main parameters - Amplitude (strength), Frequency shift (Doppler shift) and decay time. This
allows us to determine the relative size of the meteor strike (vertical scale) and the relative approximate speed and deceleration (amount of shift
and width of the trace).

You can see the output from our system above in real time (approximately 1 minute delay on the Internet). During a meteor shower this trace will be
full of strike traces, but it is also surprising how many meteors are striking Earth’s atmosphere all of the time.

It's called the Geminids meteor shower, it peaks today/tonight, I'm about to head out with the camera, expect 30 - 100 per hour, maybe more if there
is a burst.

edit on 13/12/12 by woogleuk because: (no reason given)

Hi woogleuk,

I have seen about 10 of those meteors so far. At first I thought I was just seeing things, then realized/remembered something about a metoeor shower.
Funny thing is, all of a sudden there was a huge influx of airplanes. I am in the path of LAX and Burbank airports, and I have not seen so many
planes at once, must have seen close to 2 dozen in 15 minutes. Weird I tell ya. . .

the same star/planet/jupiter? is in the sky at the moment above me. I looked at the placement of the stars in comparison to this earlier and then
went outside to look, its placed differently in the sky here and now the three stars in a line cannot be seen in the cam---they went below the
horizon. As you can tell I am definitley a layman with the terms

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